When will I be moving up in stakes?

Currently I play 2NL at poker stars and I'll give a quick summary of my online poker career. I use to play pokerstars for play money and left the account to rot after i realized play money tables were stupid. Then one day i got an email from pokerstars saying they gave me $5 real money to play with. I opened up two 2NL tables and started carefully grinding it out and currently am sitting on $28 in less than 3k hands.

1. How many hands will I expect to have played before moving up to 5NL? Would it be around 9k hands since I'm suppose to have a $75 bankroll?
2. Should I ever increase my buyin at .01-.02 instead of moving straight to 5NL? What are the advantages/disadvantages of increasing the buyin amount?
3. What is a good # of tables to multi table? I found 6 to be a relatively comfortable number but I don't get dealt hands fast enough. With 8 tables they get dealt fast enough, but sometimes I can't follow the action
4. How many hands is considered a good sample size of my progress?

As always, thanks in advance

1. However many it takes for you to get to $100.

2. Buyin for more when you get closer to moving up (so that big losses don't hurt your roll so bad) and you want to have a bad player covered. Advantage is being able to get paid bigger w/ your good hands. Disadvantage is losing more if you play bad or get coolered.

3. Play just enough that you aren't getting too bored. But keep in mind that while you are bored there are things you could be watching, trying to get better reads on players who are involved in hands.

4. Don't worry much about your winrate at this point as long as your roll is growing. Just play until rolled for 5nl. To answer your question though, probably something like 20k hands would give you a decent idea. But hopefully you will be improving as you play, so you won't be the same player at the end of that period as you were at the beginning, so the winrate over that period doesn't mean much then either.

Deposit money and play bigger.